Contagion and Enclaves, as the title suggests, juxtaposes the terror that contagion posed to white confidence in the tropical colonies with the solace offered by enclaves—spaces of health, order, and colonial control. The title promises a widely cast history of medicine that might illuminate the ambivalence at the heart of empire and illustrate the dual face of colonialism—an exploitative economic and cultural enterprise cast as a mission to civilize subjects and to cure ills, predestined to fall short of its mission. This is a book, then, that seems eminently suited for the series “Postcolonialism across the Disciplines,” in which it is published. But while the title tantalizes with the promise of interdisciplinary contagion, the monograph remains entrenched within the boundaries of its subdisciplinary enclave.
The subdisciplinary concerns that circumscribe the book are spelled out in the introductory chapter that references a well-established “canon” of colonial medicine to discuss the status of the tropics in European medical writing, the disciplinary foundations of tropical medicine, and the role of the state in institutionalizing Western medicine in India. In setting up the core concept of the book—the “enclave”—Bhattacharya engages with David Arnold's groundbreaking work on the deep nexus forged between medical science and colonial power in India.Footnote 15 While Arnold studied cantonments and jails as privileged sites for the entrenchment of Western medicine precisely because of the particularly skewed power dynamic in these institutions, Bhattacharya extends the definition of enclaves as “distinct zones of colonial habitation, power and productivity” that were nevertheless part of colonial civil society and economy (p. 8). She suggests, therefore, that plantations and sanatoriums of the Darjeeling hills were coterminous enclaves. This sound proposition, and the spatial focus, is maintained throughout the book, albeit to uneven analytical effect.
The first three chapters describe the creation of the “hill-station” of Darjeeling (the next three turn to the tea plantations that thrived around it) and are best read as a background for the core of the book. In these, the author treads familiar ground to detail the emergence of Darjeeling as a “hill station”—a salubrious zone in contrast to the surrounding plains of Bengal, and as an “enclave”—a (white) space of rejuvenation, and a (healthy) site for sanatoriums. Bhattacharya concludes with the initially intriguing suggestion that “hill-stations were . . . not unique to the mountains” (p. 35), by which the author means that they carried forward a tradition of civil stations and European enclaves—marked by racial and sanitary segregation—from the plains. This insight does not, however, lead the author to a discussion of race (an omission that is particularly glaring in a study focused on plantation economies), colonial “frontiers” of fragile state control, the real and symbolic threat posed by unofficial “settlers” to a colonial state, or the fit between a “plantation economy” and a “colonial economy.” This is a missed opportunity that might have opened up a discussion of colonial power across disciplinary and national boundaries. The author concludes, instead, that hill-station “enclaves” were a figment of the colonial imagination because they were really neither salubrious nor exclusive spaces, for they existed cheek by jowl with colonial plantations that ran on native labor.
Some of the analytical promise is made good, however, as we move on to chapter 5, and leave behind the subdisciplinary enclave of (a certain type of) “history of medicine” that is increasingly skittish about colonial power. This rich and well-written chapter documents how the enclavism of the plantation economy was challenged by the state's intrusive medical surveys commissioned by the Government of India. It presents a close reading of the Christophers-Bentley report (1906), which questioned modes of recruitment, wage structure, and the planters’ autonomy, and thus confronted the political and moral economy of the plantation system. While the report identified problems with sanitation, housing, nutrition, and medical infrastructure rather than with the land or the people (as was more common in colonial medical discourse), its conclusions were resisted by the planters and ultimately superseded by the findings of a more sympathetic Monahan report. The reports disagreed on the planters' responsibility for the health and sanitation of the laborers, and on the relationship between the economic status of the workers and their sanitary state. Even as a compromise was reached that partially restored the planters' autonomy and their system of paternalism, the tensions and compromises persisted over the next forty years, which saw the gradual incorporation of the plantations into the colonial economy.
Chapter 6 continues to explore the tensions between the planters' paternalism and state control on the ground, while chapter 7 traces how the plantation emerged as a key site for the production of the specialized field of tropical medicine, and where large-scale efforts to research malaria, hookworm, and other diseases were sustained by the “dual imperatives” of the local and the international. The concluding chapter traces the end of the enclave—with its structures of segregation, privilege, and paternalism—in postcolonial India.
The book is hard to read, not because of its complex ideas or use of jargon, of which it is remarkably free, but because the early chapters, in particular, are missing introductory passages that might have aided the lay reader and drawn in the non-specialist. The hasty writing and/or poor editing of the first three chapters is particularly unfortunate, as the author's skills of analysis are evident in the chapters that follow. “Postcolonialism across the Disciplines” this may not be, but the book fulfills its tasks within the frames of a field that has decidedly taken a turn towards creating a subdisciplinary enclave, largely untainted by the wider concerns of South Asian historiography or postcolonial theory, and more or less immune (but not quite) to the critical perspectives on medicine and the body offered by science studies, gender and race theorists, subaltern studies, or medical anthropology. That in its best parts this work is inoculated by the concerns of the labor historian makes it well worth reading for historians of medicine in India.
